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Pelosi on whether US should disclose killing US citizens - "Maybe."

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is not sure whether the public should be told when the federal government kills an American citizen.
"Maybe. It just depends," she said in an interview with The Huffington Post this week, when asked whether the administration should acknowledge when it targets a U.S. citizen in a drone strike.

Pelosi disputed the assertion that Democrats are less critical of the drone program than they would have been if George W. Bush were still president, arguing, "Those opposed are pretty critical, and other people are just listening to see what this is and why this is necessary, because we're in a different world."

But she also hinted at another reason that the administration may be getting the benefit of the doubt from some lawmakers:

Polls.

"It's interesting how popular it is in the public," she said, recalling that the same polling dynamic prevailed during the fight over warrantless wiretaps. "People just want to be protected. And I saw that when we were fighting them on surveillance, the domestic surveillance. People just want to be protected: 'You go out there and do it. I'll criticize you, but I want to be protected.'"

President Barack Obama defended his administration’s use of drones to target and assassinate Americans overseas believed to be working with terrorists, insisting the government is following the law on what it can and cannot do. But he admitted the public needs to know more about how the drone program works and what rules the administration is following.

“What I think is absolutely true is that it is not sufficient for citizens to just take my word for it that we are doing the right thing,” Obama said in an online chat sponsored by Google.

Asked if the United States could target a United States citizen on American soil, Obama said no.

“There has never been a drone used on an American citizen on American soil, and we respect and have a whole bunch of safeguards in terms of how we conduct counterterrorism in the United States,” Obama said.

But he said the rules outside the U.S.” are “different”—and said it was his responsibility as the president to work with Congress to implement a “mechanism” to be more forthcoming with the public so that people understand “what is going on, what the constraints are, (and) what the legal parameters are.”